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Synopsis

One morning in Don Mills, Phil and his brother Jay agree to let their friend Norman Kitchen tag along on an adventure down into a ravine — and what happens there at the hands of two pitilessteenagers changes all their lives forever. Years later the horrifying details are still unclear, smothered in layers of deliberate forgetting. Phil doesn’t even remember the names: Ted and Terry? Tom and Tony? It’s only when he descends into a crisis of his own that he comes to realize that perhaps, as he drunkenly tells a crisis line counsellor, “I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.”

The Ravineis Phil’s book — we read it as he types it, in the basement apartment he’s called home since his wife kicked him out for having an affair with a make-up girl. As he writes, and then corrects what he’s written, we hear how he went from promising young playwright to successful, self-hating TV producer. We listen in on his disastrous late-night phone calls, and watch his brother (once a brilliant classical pianist) weep to himself as he plays Ravel and Waltzing Matilda in a desolate bar. The Ravinetells us all about the influence of The Twilight Zone on Phil’s work and his life — how it helped him meet his wife Veronica and then lose her, and how it led to the bizarredeath of his friend, TV star Edward Milligan. Sometimes, when Phil’s drunk, a friend will look at what he’s written so far and call him on it — like when Jay tells Phil that he’s remembered it all wrong: that he was just as good as Phil at tying knots back when they were in the cubs.

Phil’s “ravine”is his attempt to make sense of things, to try to understand how everything went so wrong just as it seemed to be going so right. But The Ravineis also a Paul Quarrington novel, meaning that it’s hilarious and ingenious, quietly working its magic until the reader is at once heartbroken and hopeful. A darkly funny story about loss and redemption, The Ravineis also about how stories are made — how they can pull us out of disasters that seem too much for anyone to bear — and about how, sometimes, what we need to forgive ourselves for is not what we think it is at all.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt

“Distress Hotline. Carlos speaking.”

“Carlos? Phil here.”

“Phil! How’s it hanging?”

“How’s it hanging? Is that really an appropriate way to greet callers to a distress centre?”

“Phil, we’ve talked about this. You are not really in distress.”

“Says who?”

“Says all of us. You’re depressed, you’ve got this ­self-­destructive drinking thing going on, but you don’t pose any true threat to yourself or others.”

“I beg to differ. I pose a huge threat to others. Why, look at what I’ve already done to them! And I wasn’t even trying.”

“Phil, some of what you’re going through is just life, you know. I mean, I’ve gone through some of this stuff. My marriage fell apart . . .”

“Really?”

“Big time. Mirella just decided she was in love with somebody else. She decided at, I don’t know, eleven o’clock in the morning, she was out, she was fucking gone, before dinner.”

“Do you have kids?”

“A boy and a girl. Six and three. And now there is this really bitter custody battle, she keeps dragging up all this heroin stuff that is like years old.”

“Hmm. Heroin, you say?”

“I’ve been clean for twelve fucking years. She’s a ruthless bitch to even mention it. And it’s not like she was a fucking Girl Guide. I mean, there’s been some shit in her body, you can bet your ass on that.”

“Uh-­huh.”

“And like this sexuality stuff. I mean, whose goddam business is that?”

“Whose sexuality are we discussing?”

“Mine. There has been a little confusion. A little ambivalence. But who among us is absolutely one hundred per cent hetero?”

“I guess so. Look, Phil, sorry, sorry, I mean, you called me, we should talk about . . . so? What happened tonight that made you pick up the phone?”

“Well . . .”

“Aside from drinking four bottles of wine or whatever it was.”

“I just called to say, um, I won’t be calling any more. I mean, it’s been pleasant getting to know you all, but maybe it’s taken up a little bit too much of my time. And I need time, now, I need lots of it.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m working on a book.”

“Really? A book about what? Your career in television?”

“Well, I might mention that.”

“People find television very interesting.”

“I have noticed. But I think my book is going to be a bit more general.”

“Like about how you screwed around and did all these things which you think are so bad but really aren’t? Things that when you get right down to it are a little bit boring?”

“Yeah. And of course there’ll be quite a bit about my career in television.”

“What are you going to call this book?”

“Umm . . . The Ravine.”

“The Ravine? How come?”

“Because it seems to me, Carlos, that I went down into a ravine, and never really came back out.”

1 | The Ravine

When i was eleven, and jay was ten, we joined the wolf cubs.

I was actually too old to be a ­Cub–­at eleven a lad should be a proper Boy ­Scout–­but there is apparently a kind of apprenticeship that Lord ­Baden-­Powell insisted be undertaken, symbolically represented by placing two little stars in your Cub beanie, which means you then have both eyes open. This has to do with the wolf imagery, you see, the baby cub growing until the ­birth-­gook clears from his eyelids and they pop open with ­self-­realization. I adored all that wolf stuff, I loved sitting around in a circle with the other boys and ­chanting–­praying–­to the plastic wolf’s head that our scoutmaster held mounted on a ­staff.

“Akeyyyy-­la! We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!”

Jay and I still do this, after several too many at Birds of a Feather, the hateful bar at which my brother has been resident pianist for lo these many years. At least, we used to do this, but haven’t for months now, because Jay and I aren’t talking. He’s mad at me for screwing up my life. He should talk. But before this estrangement (and often) we used to stumble out onto the street and find a suitable object for our ­veneration–­the moon, a comely hooker, a ­two-­fingered man playing the ­ukulele–­and we’d snap to attention and begin the Grand ­Howl.

“Akeyyyy-­la! We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!”

Despite my enthusiasm for the Wolf Cubs, I never did get both eyes opened. I managed a solitary gold star and then quit the organization, or was forced out, I have forgotten exactly what happened. Anyway, one gets one’s eyes opened by achieving badges in various ­disciplines–­arts and crafts, outdoorsmanship, ­map-­reading–­but I was a failure at all these things. The only thing I was ever any good at was ­knot-­tying. For some reason, I was a whiz at tying knots, despite chubby little fingers and spectacularly bad eyesight. (I’m legally blind in my left eye, and my right is only marginally better.) But when the scoutmaster handed me lengths of rope, these handicaps faded away; indeed, they may have been a benefit, my sense receptors overcompensating for the little cocktail sausages that housed them, some inner sense making crystal clear what my eyes rendered indistinct. The scoutmaster always called upon me to demonstrate new knots. I would hold two lengths in front of me, one white, the other darkened (still far away from the ­pitch-­black second strand featured in the manual), and announce the knot–“Garrick’s Bend”–before grabbing a standing end and setting things into ­motion.

Setting out on this novelizing journey, I have some doubts about my visual memory. I read an interview with Alice Munro once (despite my low standing as a television writer, I maintain an interest in such things), who said that when she was shown a ­black-­and-­white photograph of her grade two (or something) class, she could recall the colour of everyone’s blouse, sweater, skirt. Shown a picture of my grade two class, I would be challenged to pick out myself, were it not for the huge clue of my spectacles. However, I can conjure in my mind the sight of Jay in his Wolf Cub uniform. Clothes have always been ­ill-­fitting on Jay, none more so than those huge shorts and green shirt. His legs and arms stuck out like pins in a voodoo doll. Jay was always a small fellow, ­undernourished–­if you saw the two of us together, as children, you might conclude that I had been stealing the food from his plate. (Which may have been true, now that I think of it. He never cared all that much for food.) He was and is a small fellow, except for his hands (which aided in his career as concert, and subsequently cheesy, pianist) and his head (which has since birth seemed too great a weight for him to bear).

There was another Cub, named Norman Kitchen, who desperately wanted to befriend me. I don’t know why, exactly. He attended another school in the district, but even so, I can’t believe he was unaware of my ranker status. After all, he’d seen me several times at the Galaxy Odeon in the company of my brother and Rainie van der Glick. Kitchen was a plump lad, with blond hair that was obviously his mother’s pride and joy, as I can’t believe either nature or a ­ten-­year-­old boy could come up with such an elaborate display of curls. Norman Kitchen had dark, hooded eyes and a nose that seemed to have been carved for a marionette. His lips were thick, and pursed much of the time, as though he lived in constant expectation of having to buss a dowager aunt on the cheek. Norman was quiet, although when he did speak, he spoke very loudly. He tended to draw too near to people, as if wishing to speak conspiratorially, and then open his mouth and blast away. This is an irritating habit, so I rejected his friendship, although I think in retrospect that I spurned Norman Kitchen only to exact a tiny amount of revenge for the way I was treated by most ­people.

Wolf Cub meetings were held twice a week, Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons. They were held at the Valleyway United Church, which lay across the field from the back of our house, a couple of hundred yards away from the school. The church, I mean the building itself, exerted a strange influence upon me. I never went there to take part in services, because my mother was not a religious soul. I had never been inside the church until I went for Wolf Cubs, but as soon as I entered I felt a strange familiarity creep over me, as though I’d returned to a place that I’d missed very much. At the end of the lobby was a huge ­stained-­glass window, Jesus standing with his hands spread before him, as though he were saying, “The fish was yay big, swear to Dad.” I liked to arrive at the church early, and mill around the lobby, absorbing salvation. But my brother would grow impatient; he’d tug my sleeve and we’d descend into the basement. We’d join a circle of boys and chant, ­“Akeyyyy-­la! We’ll do our best! Dib dib dib, dob dob dob!”

One Sunday afternoon Jay and I cycled over to the church, even though in order to do so it was necessary to follow the streets (Langstaff to Juniper Way up to Dunedin and across) and it would have been much quicker to just walk across the field. But it was a glorious late spring/early summer day, so Jay and I jumped on our bikes and pedalled over. By coincidence, Norman Kitchen had done the same thing, so after the Cub meeting the three of us met up by the bike stand. Kitchen hollered at me, “Hey, Phil! Let’s do something!”

“Jay and I are going for an adventure,” I said. I was fascinated by the concept of having an adventure, which was what all the boys on television had. They had adventures effortlessly, all they had to do was walk outside, but I understood that this was ­make-­believe, and that if I wanted to have an adventure I was probably going to have to bike somewhere. “You can’t come.”

“Why not?” demanded Norman at a pitch. “I could be your sidekick!”

“Jay is my sidekick.”

“I’m not your sidekick,” muttered Jay, who had busied himself with some bicycle maintenance, namely, readjusting the clothes pegs that held the trading cards that were purred by the spokes. “I’m your brother.”

One of the reasons Jay had busied himself was to get distance from me and my nastiness to Norman, so I drew a breath and reconsidered. “Tell you what, Kitchen. You can’t be the sidekick. But you could be the fat guy who drinks too much and does the cooking and gets killed.”

“Okay!” he ­agreed.

I pulled my bike out of the rack and leapt into the saddle. “Let’s ride!”

The area where I grew up is now simply part of Toronto, but when I was a boy it was a separate entity. It lay a few miles to the north of the downtown core and was separated by wide tracts of undeveloped land. Don Mills (Canada’s First Planned Community!) and the city were connected by the Don River, which once teemed with salmon, although nowadays a fish would have a better chance of survival in a cheap motel. Anyway, as you all remember from your Earth sciences, rivers form valleys over vast stretches of time, even a sluggish thing like the Don. The Don Valley was, in sections, parkland, where the woods were tamed and beautified, and walkways ran between beds of cultivated flowers. But there were other areas that were just left alone. The pathway would stop abruptly, and the forest would loom dark and ­dense.

This was my best shot at adventure, I figured, so I led Jay and Kitchen down into the valley, and we cycled with gleeful fury through the manicured woodlands. And then the path stopped, abruptly, and we leapt off our bicycles and stared ahead to where a forested slope descended to the river. I could spot another body of water, too, small and round. Part of the river had been diverted and formed a stagnant pond. And although no boy on television had ever encountered adventure at a stagnant pond, I said, “We’re going down there.”

“I don’t want to,” said ­Jay.

“I know you don’t want to. But you have to. Besides,” I said, “it’ll be fun!”

The pond had been created by chance, the edge of the river running into a berm, water sloughing off into a depression, a small regular bowl. I’m guessing out in the middle it would have been perhaps three or four feet deep. Around the edges it was only a few inches, and it was easy enough for us to remove our shoes and socks and (seeing as we were already wearing our Cub shorts) go wading into the ­muck.

“Why are we doing this?” demanded Kitchen, who soon had a leech on his shin. I judged that the kind of thing he’d rather not ­know.

“I win,” announced Jay quietly. The sleeve of his Cub shirt was wet with muck up past the elbow and he had his huge hand wrapped around something; he held it up to his eye and peered into the hole made by his thumb and ­fingers.

Kitchen and I slopped over. “Let’s see.” Jay brought up his other hand, cupped the two together and then fanned them apart slightly so that we could see the creature caught in the fold. It was not quite frog, and therefore horrible looking, saddled with a long tail that was spotted and decaying. This thing also had a huge bump on its head, a cancerous growth or ­something.

We stared at this rara avis for a long moment, and then we heard a voice. “Hey, kid. What’ve you got there?”

Two boys stood by the side of the stagnant pond. Both were tall, sprouted violently by adolescence. Although they shared certain clothing and ­characteristics–­jean jackets, jeans, black running shoes, height and ­build–­they were very dissimilar. One was ­fair–­actually, fair is putting it mildly, he approached albinism. The kid didn’t have pink eyes or anything, but the blue of his irises was so light that it was virtually invisible. These eyes, these white eyes, the boy kept popped open in apparent surprise, although one would think that the sunlight would rush right through and sear his brain. So he gave the impression of blindness, although it was this boy who had demanded, “Hey, kid. What’ve you got there?” His hair retained a dazzling whiteness even after maybe half a tube of Brylcreem, and about half a tube is what it would require to create the particular creation he wore. The sides were combed up and the hair met in the middle, actually high above the middle, of the boy’s head. Some of this wave rushed back to form an intricate design, what was commonly called a duck’s ass, while the rest of the wave pushed forward with increasing volume until it exploded in front of his forehead, by which point it had achieved the firm roundness of a breast or ­buttock.

About Paul Quarrington

The author of ten novels, Paul Quarrington was also a musician (most recently in the band Porkbelly Futures), an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, and an acclaimed non-fiction writer.

Paul Quarrington's novel, Galveston, was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; King Leary won the CBC's 2008 Canada Reads competition and the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal; and Whale Music was awarded the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Recently, Porkbelly Futures' self-titled second CD has been released to widespread acclaim, and Paul Quarrington's short film adaptation of The Ravine, entitled Pavane, was featured in the Moving Stories Short Film Festival. Paul Quarrington's non-fiction writing includes books on some of his favourite pastimes, such as fishing, hockey, and music. A regular contributor of book reviews, travel columns, and journalism to Canada's national newspapers and magazines, he also taught writing at Humber College and the University of Toronto.

Paul Quarringon passed away in January 2010.

Author Q&A

What first inspired you to write this novel?

To be perfectly candid, I was inspired by a therapist who asked, “Have you ever written about your mother?” “Nope,” I replied, so I went home and started writing about a memory I had, specifically when my family got our first television set. I was fairly old when this happened, perhaps eight or nine, and it occurred to me as I was writing that it really had a profound effect on me, the arrival of that hulking piece of furniture with its black-and-white dreams. Other things occurred to me as I worked on that first piece — how my memory was faulty, how much I loved The Twilight Zone, my relationship with my younger brother — and by the time I was finished, I kind of had the idea for the whole novel. This section was, for many drafts, Chapter One, but I believe it got down-shifted to Chapter Four or so, and it marks my mother’s only appearance in these (or any other) pages.

How would you describe the connections between Paul Quarrington and Phil McQuigge?

Phil and I share certain characteristics and tendencies. Let’s face it, we’re the same guy. None of the specifics are true — the incident in the ravine, the marital demise, etcetera — but we have lived through, fundamentally, the same experiences.

How did writing The Ravine, your tenth novel, present different challenges from writing your other books (or in what ways was it similar)? What was the biggest difficulty, and how did you get through it?

Because The Ravine was not completely fictional (as was, say, Galveston), the main problem the writing presented was that it demanded a kind of emotional nakedness. I don’t think of myself as a very artistically courageous writer (and I greatly admire those that are) but I mustered what little nerve I could to write the book. The similarity with my other work is . . . writing it was a blast! I always think, “If I don’t have any fun as I’m writing this thing, no one’s going to have any fun reading it.” And even though I can be quite serious-minded, I try to be as entertaining as possible!

As well as being an award-winning novelist and screenwriter, you’re an acclaimed filmmaker and musician, among other things. How do music and film and your other work inform your writing, especially in the case of The Ravine?

Well, Phil fears that he too easily abandoned the novel (this is his first attempt) and the theatre for the world of television, and I sometimes feel that I have applied too much energy to non-novel — related projects. As for the music, Phil’s brother, Jay, plays piano in a bar, and I intended his music to work as a kind of soundtrack for the book. I have made a short film, Pavane, with a producer named Judith Keenan who has a company called BookShorts. Even though the film is only six minutes long, I think it manages to draw all of these things — the characters, music, film, etcetera — together. I’m really proud of it.

What’s next for Paul Quarrington?

I’m writing a book about my involvement in music. I used to say my “career” in music, but until I manage to actually get a career, I’m going with “involvement.” It is called The Song and I talk about a lot of songs, and songwriters, that I feel are influential. A kind of companion piece is a novel, The Songwriter. It’s an odd kind of murder mystery, and in many ways it’s sort of a country & western Whale Music.

From the Hardcover edition.

Awards

Awards

NOMINEE 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Discussion Questions

Discussion Guides

1. “That’s probably the thing I’m best at in my life, tying knots,” Phil says. Is it a fair description of his life and the book we’re reading? How?

2. How does TV influence Phil’s life and The Ravine as a whole?

3. Several times Phil corrects himself, and doubts his memories of events he’s told us about or has these accounts refuted by other characters (whose words he transcribes). Is Phil a reliable narrator? What effect does his reliability as a narrator have on your sense of him and his life?

4. What do you regard as the funniest moment in this otherwise dark book?

5. Why does Phil have an affair with Bellamy?

6. Phil’s daughters are named Ellis and Currer; the man who directs his first play is called George Gordon; he is friends with a (William) Beckett. What’s the significance of names in The Ravine?

7. What does The Ravinetell us about “high” v. “popular” culture? (Among other things, you might consider the arguments Jay and Phil have about their careers, the importance of The Twilight Zone and Barchester Towers to the plot of The Ravine, and the role played by John Hooper.)

8. “I should let you know, John — and this might affect your next book — there is a reclamation project in the works.” In what ways is The Ravinea reclamation project?

9. In what ways does The Ravinedefine personal and/or professional success?

10. What different responses to evil does The Ravineexplore?

11. The Ravinefeatures a large cast of major characters — Phil, Jay — and more minor characters, including Phil’s rival, the novelist John Hooper; barmaid and doctoral student Amy; Phil’s sometime-girlfriend, Bellamy; Veronica’s new boyfriend, Kerwen. . . . Who is your favourite minor character in the book, and why?

12. “Just because we’re brothers doesn’t mean we’re the same or even similar.” Describe the relationship between Phil and Jay McQuigge. Why does Jay help Phil the way he does?

13. Phil writes about what he’s writing as he’s writing it. Starting out he tells us his strengths and weaknesses as a novelist; when he writes a scene in screenplay form, he says that it’s because “it affords distance.” Later on, a character in Hooper’s novel Baxter turns out to be based on Phil (and to further confuse things, his name is Paul). What do you make of the uses of metafiction — the ways The Ravineis aware of itself and about itself — in this novel?

14. How is The Ravinesimilar to and different from Paul Quarrington’s other books?

15. What is the “eleventh commandment” in The Ravine, and why does it matter?

16. Do you like Phil McQuigge? Or, are you at least willing to see what he makes of himself? How does Paul Quarrington keep alive the reader’s sympathy for his drunk, self-obsessed, self-destructive narrator?

17. Which Twilight Zone episode best describes Phil’s life?

18. Paul Quarrington described The Ravine as what would happen if he wrote Mystic River, the Dennis Lehane novel that was made into a film by Clint Eastwood. What does he mean?

19. Will you recommend The Ravineto your friends? Why, or why not?

20. “Well, can’t you just make something up?” How do you feel about the ending of The Ravine?

Related Videos

On the Web

Interview with Paul Quarrington, author of Canada Reads winner King Leary, and The Ravine.